We Are the End

by Gonzalo Garcia

  ‘Yes. Well, it’s not that serious,’ she says with a big smile, ‘it’s a party, a party, a big party,’ she repeats before covering her face and hugging him.

  ‘I’m sorry. So, how have you been anyway?’ Tomás asks, between bites that burn his lips. ‘How’s work?’

  ‘Apart from Dad dying, you…’ she pauses and looks at him from head to toes. She sighs. ‘Sorry, that’s just mean. I’m OK. You know me, I’m always OK,’ she says, looking at her own shadow which is much larger than she is.

  ‘Come on, you have a sweet life ahead of you. Screw that, you already have it,’ he says, taking one of her hands, cold and tiny. Is he really doing this? Where was she when Eva left? What about him? Well, there is the fact that no one knows Eva left him apart from Jaime and Yiyo. There is that. But there is also anger, pure and irrational hate, HATE, for those who knew Eva and let her get away, and HATE for himself for even beginning to think like this. But Angela doesn’t know. She doesn’t know anything. No one does. So he continues without even knowing how he feels.

  ‘You’re OK because everything works out for you. I mean, I might not share your beliefs and all that but you get things done. That’s what matters. You interview celebrities for God’s sake. I’m lucky if a student even talks to me. And if they do, which they don’t, it would be to ask about you and—’

  ‘—Tomás.’

  ‘But it’s true, like—’

  ‘—Tomás.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I got fired.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I got fired. And it was months ago. I know, I should have told you but I didn’t want you to worry, what with your games not taking off and all. I’m back to, ugh, I can’t even say it,’ she puts one hand on her lips as if ready to puke, ‘but it is what it is and the universe knows best. I’m back to blogging,’ she says and throws the fork with the rest of her sausage into a clutter of bushes by the church gates. ‘You had to wear black,’ she says, now starting to cry.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I know you are, little brother, you always are.’

  He puts his arm around her. It lasts forever. The cold breeze straightens his back, almost aching, and he realises he isn’t close to his sister, that he doesn’t understand her. Eva once said she was growing closer to her family as years went by, and he agreed. When she asked him why he thought that was the case, he said it was because people get lonelier as they get older, and like other aspects of adult life, obligation becomes pleasurable, something to live for. She looked at him with a half-smile, turned her night table light off and turned to face the wall. ‘Is that what’s going to happen to us? Is that all there is?’ He said it wasn’t, but he couldn’t touch her that night.

  ‘Thank you,’ Angela says, wiping her face. ‘Let’s try and keep the party going, alright?’

  ‘OK but, what, how, what happened?’ he asks.

  ‘Look, Dad’s dead, Tomás. Today, out of all days, I don’t want to talk about it. Just don’t tell mum or she’ll worry about money even more than she already is.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

  ‘It is what it is. And I’ll be taking Mum to India with me for a few months. She needs to get out of here so she can rekindle her love for the universe.’

  ‘I’ll help you pay it.’

  ‘Alejandro is paying.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Alejandro is coming,’ she says, and she waves over at him – Alejandro – as she says it. Just hearing the words ‘Alejandro’ and ‘coming’ in one sentence makes Tomás a little sick to the stomach.

  ‘And you should prepare the eulogy. I sorted out a stage for you already at the Golf Club.’

  What? He has not done the…

  ‘I’m ready,’ he says with a nod.

  ‘You better be. Mum will be upset if her only son has nothing to say about his father.’

  He nods and watches her leave. She jogs over to the cotton candy kiosk, where a guy wearing something like a Peter Pan costume rolls her a perfect pink candy cloud. She then walks to his mother, leaving Tomas alone, with all the hippies. It’s hard for him to see his mother this way. She’s sitting alone, cross-legged on a bench wearing a purple toga with sunflowers on the knees. She looks like she’s angry, a hard frown directed at no one in particular, and her toga hangs too large on her, like she’s disappearing into her costume, and her shoulders are exposed and sunburnt and no one is even looking at her. Why is no one even looking at her, sitting with her? Even harder is knowing what to say to her. He lights another cigarette to the sound of the scout leader whistling the end of the tent session. As he watches the kids dismantling them, and as he sees them laughing at how easy it is to break things that you yourself have built, he realises why seeing his mother like this hurts him so much. He hadn’t even thought that, just like him and Eva, his mum had lost her partner, her friend. And just like him, she couldn’t do a thing about it. Is there really a difference between your girlfriend/boyfriend/wife/husband dying and going away far, so far that you’ll never get to speak or see them again? Whatever the answers are, there is a comforting finality in all of this tragedy, and he finds himself getting dizzy with the smoke and, yes, he has to admit it, admit it despite his dizziness, that he feels envious of his mother. ‘Fuck,’ he whispers to himself, stepping on the unfinished cigarette. He is envious of his grieving mother.

  He goes over to Alejandro to get another sausage.

  ‘Your mum looks pretty rough there, dude,’ Alejandro tells Tomás, handing him a napkin.

  ‘I know. She needs some time off,’ he says.

  ‘We all need time off. I’m sure you could also—’

  ‘—Take care of her in India.’

  ‘She’ll come back like new, just you remember.’

  ‘No weird animal shit, alright?’

  ‘I’ve done my time, dude,’ Alejandro says; he holds both his hands up.

  Maybe Alejandro isn’t so bad after all. Could it be possible that it was all a mistake? Could it have been an LSD trip filled with visions of homeless pumas waiting to be rescued, and he, Alejandro, saving them all? Most likely not. Maybe Ale, fuck it, Alejjjjandro, The World’s Brother, is his brother too. Maybe Tomás will go to India with him. Would Alejandro pay? He definitely would pay. And first class too. Maybe if Tomás went he’d come back like new, and some mentalist hippie will blow hallucinogens up his nose like those anthropologists on TV, and he’d forget Eva ever existed and then the universe will decide this and that and he laughs, he laughs because he actually said ‘the universe’ out loud, at his father’s fucking funeral, he’s dead, fuck he’s dead here and now and in every universe and at the level of a person, no, the fucking atom, and he can’t stop laughing, u-niverse, what nonsense, what utter nonsense. The V makes you bite your lips, just like E-Va, sexy nonsense, but still, the whole universe decides thing is such bullshit. Eva decided. He did not. But shit, his dad’s dead… His mum’s alone. Eva left him. He is alone. That’s all that matters. And if the universe had anything to do with either, well then, fuck the universe.

  Tomás flicks the new cigarette away and he watches the old orange circle burn out as he thinks about the Indian sunsets he has now decided he will never see.

  So what can he say about his father? He hadn’t even thought about the eulogy before Angela mentioned it. What can anyone say to the dead, to the gone, that can’t be summed up in the things we say to the living: ‘see you, bye!’ But the obvious truth is these sorts of things, the funeral, the funeral ‘party’, the clothes, the tears, the speech… They’re for those who still need to get up and go to work and sleep and get up again knowing that they got left behind. Tomás can say anything. It’s a bit like the best kind of stand-up, where the comedian talks about people who aren’t there as if they were there at their absent expense. But what does he say about his father? He realises he only knows a handful of things about him (do we ever know more than that about anyone?). He takes his IDEAS bo
ok and writes them down in bullet points.

  He HATED Argentinians (not a great way to start).

  He had high cholesterol and diabetes (Tomás should really eat better).

  He liked to fly (is it not too soon to say it?).

  He was a good pilot (he crashed!).

  He invented cereal boxes which kept toys hidden at the end of the box with a patented sticky tape system.

  He liked Eva. He believed in him and Eva.

  He loved Mum more than anything in the world.

  And that is it. He wonders how long he’s expected to talk for and almost walks over to his sister and mother to ask them but she just won’t stop crying, which is probably the one thing he is expected to do but can’t, because of all the colourful hippies surrounding him like a swarm of helium birthday balloons.

  Tomás walks into the small chapel to the side of the church. There are women holding rosaries and no one says a thing. His dad’s coffin is in the middle of the room (will it inspire him?), and there’s a guy dressed as a clown, nose and all, spray-painting it with red flowers and glittering waves and a cartoon sun with a sad face. Tomás walks up to the coffin, stretches on his toes. Inside, his dad’s wearing a purple suit, his cheeks bright red circles, his lips contorted into a forced smile that shows his teeth. He has a silver aeroplane pin on his chest.

  ‘Any last words?’ the clown asks him, spraying another layer of green onto a tree.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tomás answers.

  The clown adds just that to the coffin: I DON’T KNOW.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Tomás asks him.

  ‘Uh, making the last adjustments?’ the artist says, as if spray-painting a coffin was the most obvious thing in the world.

  ‘What adjustments could you possibly want to add?’ Tomás asks, waving one hand over the mess of neon graffiti that now look like hieroglyphics, like they’re going to bury a pharaoh who loved ecstasy raves and German electronica. What music did his father like? He has no fucking clue. Eva liked French retro which…

  ‘Your dad is going out in style, dude.’

  But didn’t he already go out in ‘style’? Could there possibly be a more sensational way to die? Spontaneous combustion. Maybe that. Though Tomás doesn’t believe in it despite all the documentaries he’s watched, so no, plane crash remains number one.

  Seeing the pin on his dad’s chest makes Tomás feel a little guilty, perhaps even a lot guilty, about not wanting to learn to fly. Sure, he’s alive because of it (he can’t say that at the eulogy!) but it would have meant a lot to his father. In fact, if it had been Tomás who had crashed and died, his father would have written the proudest eulogy in the world because, well, old people like to see that what they’ve done is not a waste of time by having younger people want to do the same things as they have (he better not say that either). If Tomás were dead, his father’s time would have remained an investment, with a shitty outcome sure, but an investment nonetheless. Now, as the artist begins to push the coffin towards the door, Tomás has nothing to think about except for wasted time, so much wasted time. Could that be the eulogy?

  • • •

  IDEAS BOOK P. 30:

  An adventure game. A game about looking, no, searching for something which, as the game progresses, changes from being unimportant to the best thing in the world. It’s about the journey, man. You, the protagonist, will have no eyes and no face, which will remain cloaked throughout the game with several colourful scarves (you will get to pick the colours). You will then travel through great expanses, the sandy peaks of the Atacama, the flower fields of the valleys, and then a vast ocean. You won’t know what you need to look for until, while running around what seems like an infinite desert, you find the first dream: a floating painting of a coastal town made up of an island with a palm tree and a castle in the middle. There’s a sound, a pleasant but sad sound bite when you pick up the item, maybe half a song, a verse, Serge’s dead leaves on repeat, or Elliott Smith’s ‘Going Nowhere’ loop.

  And so now you know that these are the things that you’re meant to chase after. You run farther and you will soon find a flower which buzzes red on top of a cliff in the desert. You are required to take a leap over a precipice to get to the flower. Everything around you darkens and a spotlight hits the flower. Do you jump? You have to. You take the flower and make a dizzying drop into the valleys, which are filled with life, animals and trees and fruit and no Serge at all, and Going Nowhere’s perfectly fine now, and it’s all so different and colourful that you can’t stop running to take in specific details. You just run. You live in the moment, man. There are many dreams here, set in rows and columns and despite them showing the same image, the island with a castle, they shine less than they used to because the visual queues (due to there being so many) are so clear.

  At the end of the last row of dreams, you find the island. The castle is only half-built but you will already know that the game is about process, man, about slow progress to something you didn’t know you wanted and now you must, absolutely must see, no, must live to see, wholly realised.

  So you run ahead, and in the time it took a cigarette to burn (Elliott Smith is still Going Nowhere) you board a boat that’s anchored to a lonely buoy no one else has discovered but you – oh the good luck of it all! – and it takes you fast through a line of dreams which you collect, and then see the castle building itself right in front of you. You must sail, no, row by continually tapping the A button and collect every dream in the ocean. You are surprised at how easy it is, and how few dreams there are. You feel larger than the castle, than the ocean even, which is now to you more like a puddle. And then, white light, the spotlight hits the island, your island, and you get the keys to the castle, your castle, a French castle, and from the throne room, your throne, you can see the moon and you can see it clearly and full, its ragged craters, its vessels cracking it in parts stuck only by mystery and chance, and there you see it, a glow of red, the first flower, the first dream, back when they felt so special. Now it is the memory that feels special. You want to feel the first jump, your hair in the tidal wavering of that dark drop Going Nowhere. You can never forget the valley, all that colour, all that life, and all the echoes that drown the conversation out (Elliott still playing) and you decide to do nothing. The castle is now more like a prison. The boat is entirely pointless. You had lived on the moon. Hours pass and you’re still there and the clock moves up a quarter of a turn. You had the whole world to look at and there are no dreams left. The castle’s bricks won’t budge and there’s only one thing you can think of before attempting your journey back Going Nowhere.

  What have I done? What have I done? I missed you a lot.

  • • •

  Tomás is on the passenger seat of his sister’s pickup truck trying to find something in his IDEAS book that he can use for the eulogy. They’re on their way to the Golf Club burial ground and they’re late. The ‘clown from earlier’ attached the coffin to a two-wheeled flat iron mount, and then adjusted a metallic cable between the mount and the truck. The hippies cheered as Angela tested the cable’s tension by driving for about five seconds. The artist then gave them the thumbs up and off they went.

  Tomás is the co-pilot. His mum decided to go with Aunt Memé because she didn’t know how to get there, and wouldn’t be able to hear any directions if she had to ask.

  He looks at the coffin from the rear-view mirror. In some fucked up way, Tomás feels proud, as if he were finally paying his dad the debt of flying. And sure, it’s Angela who’s driving but it is he who knows where they’re going and how to best get to the Golf Club.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Angela starts.

  ‘Take the next left and then into the highway again,’ Tomás says, pointing left.

  ‘Are you listening? I said I can’t believe it.’

  ‘There’s nothing to believe Angela. People die, and—’

  ‘No asshole, I meant I can’t believe we’re burying him there
.’

  ‘What, the Golf Club?’

  ‘Yes the Golf Club,’ she says, going on fifth.

  ‘You’re going too fast for…’

  ‘Like I know why and all, I really do, but couldn’t we…’

  ‘You’re going…’

  ‘There’s just no respect in it, you know? If it were up to me, we’d have him cremated or at least…’

  ‘It’s in the next…’

  ‘It’s like laughing at dead people. Imagine how Mum must feel. She’ll have to ride a fucking golf cart to see her husband’s grave. How would you…’

  ‘We missed it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We missed the exit.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, could you speak any quieter?’

  Angela pulls off an illegal U-turn in the middle of the highway. Tomás can feel the thumping of his dad’s body behind them.

  ‘The next right,’ Tomás says, looking back.

  So why are they burying their father at the Golf Club anyway? Their father had never played golf, never even owned a golf club. But their grandfather Diego had. He played a lot. Was he good at it? He was, or at least he was told that he was by all of his golf friends, as they let themselves lose bets over fairly small amounts for people with that kind of money. $1.000.000. Diego won. $2.000.000. Diego won. $5.000.000, and so on. He must have felt like the fucking king of golf, because there’s a picture of him playing with an actual golden crown. He kept it up until one day his friends decided that he should suck at golf and stopped letting Diego win, and they bet much larger sums, and Diego lost the car, an old Bentley convertible. And lost the washing machine (no one had them back then). And lost the German fridge. And the food in it. And then the money to buy the food out of it. And the house. The fucking colonial blue whale of a house with its long cold corridors and exposed terraces filled with servants wearing suits (yes, servants!), and so many flowers everywhere, down the interior balconies, lining swirling staircases, and petals just floating about like plankton in the ocean. And then there was the water fountain, which had a proud French cherub peeing in the full heat of summer. Tomás has seen the pictures. The house would have been his. But grandfather Diego lost it in a bet too. He could not believe that his luck had ran out, and he killed himself a day after he lost the house. Feeling guilty, or maybe it was all just a cruel joke, the same group of friends that left him penniless paid for his funeral and buried him next to the seventh hole in the Golf Club they all used to attend. Tomás’s father has never played golf. And yet here he is, on his way to the green of hole number seven.